


hounds are brooding in my bones (but i'm a good dog running halfway home)

by pretzel



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Finale, Season 2, skimmons - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-13 22:00:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4538994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pretzel/pseuds/pretzel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons comes home a completely different person from when she left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Jemma Simmons came out of the rock on a Sunday.  
  
The monolith coughed her up with not a hack but a whoosh, expelling the scientist the way people expel a breath of air they didn’t realize they were holding. The monolith seemed relieved to be rid of its captor, as it faded back from liquid to stone, but Jemma Simmons wheezed and choked on the oxygen filling her lungs, as if she hadn’t had a taste of air for the entirety of her captivity.  
  
Five weeks, four days, 11 hours, 6 minutes. She returned at 3:17 A.M.  
  
Her sputtering woke up the only one who still had hope that she would return. Fitz had taken to sleeping on a cot in the room with the monolith, much to Mack’s displeasure, waiting patiently for the day his best friend would return.  
  
He woke to her hacking, just in time to see her turn herself over from her back, arm propped beneath her as she coughed up black liquid from her lungs. It took Fitz a moment to realize what he was going on, but once he did, he was throwing his blankets back, slipping over to the box she was still contained within, the monolith hovering over her menacingly. He fumbled with the lock, scrambling to key in the code. He desperately pulled the door open, wearily glaring at the black stone as he pulled Jemma out of the case, his arms looped under hers, and kicked the door shut after she was free, setting her down for a moment to lock it once more.  
  
Jemma was still coughing ink out of her lungs, trying to regain her breath, oxygen burning her windpipe and somehow filling her with both relief and dread, fire growing inside her and expanding into her fingertips. Suddenly, Fitz was there, hands reaching out towards her but afraid to touch, shaking as he looked at her, shock and anxiety and hope swimming in his eyes. With one ragged and shaky inhale, Jemma Simmons collapsed.  
  
\---  
  
She was put into quarantine. “We don’t know what happened to her in there, man,” Mack explained to Fitz as he locked the door on the glass room she was being held in for observation, the same room that had once contained Skye after the tunnels. “We need to keep her contained.”  
  
“Contained?” Fitz repeated, voice strained. “She hasn’t done anything. Sk-“  
  
The younger agent had been watching Jemma as she slept from outside the room, standing a little ways from Fitz and Mack as they argued. She turned to Fitz as he began with her old name, eyebrow raised.  
  
“Sorry, Daisy,” Fitz corrected himself, rubbing at the back of his next. He was never going to get used to calling the hacker by her given name. “Please tell Mack that Jemma’s fine, that there’s nothing wrong with her. She doesn’t need to be in quarantine!”  
  
With a sigh, Daisy came over to them, placing a hand on Fitz’s arm. “I’m sorry, Fitz, but I think Mack is right to keep her in there. Jiaying said that stone was meant to destroy Inhumans. We have no idea what it did to Simmons and we won’t know until she wakes up and we can talk to her. Please, I want her out as much as you do.” Maybe more. “But this is safest for everyone. Especially all the Inhumans here.”  
  
Fitz narrowed his eyes at her, turning back to Jemma in her bed. Mack raised an eyebrow at Daisy, jerking his head over to the doorway. She obliged, following him out of the room, casting a lingering glance at Jemma.  
  
“Keep an eye on her, alright?” Mack whispered once they were out of Fitz’s earshot.  
  
Daisy nodded, her eyes cast low. “Do you really think she might be dangerous?”  
  
Mack shrugged. “I’m not sure. But we have to be cautious here. Nothing good has come from having that rock here. Nothing. At least we can try to destroy it now that Agent Simmons is back. You got any ideas on how to do that?”  
  
With a shake her head, Daisy muttered, “no. And honestly, I don’t think you should have the Inhumans try at all. It feels wrong, being around that thing.”  
  
Mack nodded and clapped a hand onto her shoulder. A few months ago, Skye would have come close to crumbling under the force. But Daisy stood strong, not even flinching. “Thanks, Tremors. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”  
  
He left and Daisy returned to the infirmary and Jemma’s quarantine cell. Fitz had pulled a chair up to sit next to the clear wall, where Jemma would easily be able to see him once he woke. He was fiddling with some device, trying to occupy himself as he waited for his best friend to regain consciousness. Daisy pulled up a chair as well, settling herself in to wait.  
  
\---  
  
Daisy had never told to anyone, but the Monolith made her skin crawl. Literally.  
  
She could feel the frequency of everything in the base. As she grew more and more used to her powers, her ability to tap into those frequencies, they faded into the background. But as soon as the Monolith had been brought in, she felt its frequency first and foremost, like a mosquito buzzing persistently in her head, refusing to leave her alone. If she ever got close enough to it, she could feel its vibrations fill her as she began to shake on the same wavelength. She couldn’t be in the same room as the stone – she felt like it would shake the skin right off her and turn her bones to dust.  
  
But when Jemma had been sucked into the stone, the shaking of her skin stopped. The loudness that had been ringing in her head and in her stomach stopped and everything was quiet, quiet, quiet. It felt like she was twenty feet underwater and forgot what the world sounded like. At first, she had been relieved. That relief quickly turned to terror.  
  
Now that Jemma was back, the mosquito noise was back, but quieter, more dulled than before. She didn’t know what to make of it and the only person she had once trusted enough to talk to about this sort of thing, well, Jiaying was dead after she had tried to feed off Daisy’s life force and Daisy had killed her. The thing that frightened her most, however, was that the noise didn’t seem to quite be coming from the basement room that housed the Monolith anymore.  
  
\---  
  
Three nights after the stone coughed Jemma up, Mack, Fitz, and a team of agents stood in the same room. Hazmat suits had been donned and they worked to set up a device Fitz had developed with Mack to hopefully destroy the stone. But after the thing had sucked up Jemma and spit her back out again, they weren’t sure how it would defend itself. They were treating it like a sentient being, something capable of basic instincts. For all they knew, it was much, much smarter.  
  
After setting up the mechanisms and cameras and prepping the box containing the Monolith to be opened remotely, Mack cleared the room. They had set up a control station on the ground floor and the entire base had been emptied except for all essential personnel. Everyone else had been moved offsite to a separate base; it made more sense to move them than to risk moving the Monolith again.  
  
One of the agents on Mack’s team gave the all clear, and Mack looked to Fitz, giving the engineer the go-ahead. “It’s all yours, Turbo.”  
  
Fitz nodded, tapping a few times on his tablet before looking at the agents around him. “Everybody ready? Here we go...”  
  
\---  
  
Daisy knew the instant something changed. The buzzing that had been faint and distant moments before had suddenly erupted in her head, her skin crawling and shivering, her bones shaking and grinding. She fell to her knees, hands coming up to her head. A loud scream reached her a moment later, coming from the direction of Jemma’s quarantine. Pushing the tingling in her spine aside, Daisy got to her feet and raced down the hall toward Jemma’s screaming.  
  
Her friend was crouched on the floor, tucked in the corner between her bed and the wall. Her hands covered her ears as she screamed, one eye red from a blood vessel that had burst from the force of her screaming. She was staring straight ahead but it was clear she couldn’t see what was right in front of her – it was as if she was straining to see in the sort of pitch-blackness that only occurs deep underground.  
  
Daisy slammed into the glass around Jemma’s quarantine, yelling the scientist’s name, struggling to be heard over her screams. And all at once, everything stopped.  
  
Her skin stopped crawling, Jemma stopped screaming, the world stopped buzzing. There was dead silence; the only thing she recognized was the background humming of all the frequencies surrounding her.  
  
“Jemma? Jemma, are you okay? Jemma, please, talk to me! Jemma!”  
  
But the other woman has her eyes shut and she’s rocking back and forth in her corner, silent at first but whimpering a few moments later. Daisy banged her hand on the glass, trying to get her friend’s attention. The other woman started shaking her head while she rocked.  
  
“Oh, for the love of-“ Daisy moved to the door and opened it, protocol and Mack be damned.  
  
Jemma stopped rocking as the doors whooshed! open and Daisy came in, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Jemma, hey, what’s wrong?” The buzzing had started in her head again and she looked closely at her friend’s drooping head. “Jemma?”  
  
The scientist moved suddenly, throwing a hand out and sending Daisy flying backwards with strength she didn’t know the other woman possessed. Jemma raised her head to look at her, brown eyes steely and one shot with blood. She was angry and unwavering, not a touch of confusion or misunderstanding in her voice when she said, “Who the hell is Jemma?”


	2. hear the lonely promenade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with the premiere of season 4 and a distinct lack of skimmons, i felt we needed some skimmons in our lives. please enjoy. apologies for the angst and the wait.

For so long, there was only black. Blackness and silence and nothing. At first, Jemma had been terrified. Then confused. Then numb. Emptiness settled itself into her heart.

And then the humming began.

It started softly, just a light thrum in her blood vessels, in her capillaries and veins. It slowly grew, taking up residence in her skin and muscles, until it replaced the marrow in her very bones. It moved into her heart, evicting the emptiness that had already hung its drapes on the walls. It filled her, becoming the only thing she had in the blackness that surrounded her.

The humming whispered to her, telling her what she was and what she was to become. It painted a picture of the future, one where Jemma Simmons became all she was meant to be; a future where she was able to keep everything together, to keep her family and friends whole and complete.

And it took all of that away. Along with everything else.

She came back to her world painfully. Everything burned and ached and the pain drove the hum out of her heart, out of her bones, down to the tips of her fingertips where it settled, quietly waiting until the moment it was called on. And then, once more, everything went black.

This darkness was comforting, however. Despite the return to black, she knew this was different. She felt safe, warm. And somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she knew that she was home.

She felt like she had barely slept for ten minutes before the humming came back, violently slamming into her chest with a force that snapped her awake and sent her careening to the floor. The humming filled her, threatening to burst her skin open. she clawed at her skull, trying to hold herself together and tear herself apart. A muffled banging and yelling came from outside the room she was in, but nothing was louder, stronger, greater than the hum.

But then someone was there, grabbing her shoulder and putting their face in front of hers, saying “Jemma, hey, what’s wrong? Jemma?” _Who is Jemma? Am I Jemma?_ She recoiled from the stranger, throwing her hands out to push the other woman away. She went flying across the room, slamming into the opposite glass wall.

She opened her eyes, feeling the hum recede back into her fingertips and the base of her skull. Her voice was raw as she asked, “Who the hell is Jemma?”

The other woman pulled her hand from the back of her head, her fingertips tinted red with blood. She stared at her, confusion pooling in her dark brown eyes. “You don’t…you don’t know? Who you…?” She stood, a horrified expression on her face.

The stranger moved towards the door, Jemma’s ( _am I Jemma?)_ eyes tracking her as she went. The girl disappeared after she left the glass room, going out into the hallway and into the building.

The hum in her body tugged her after the stranger and she knew. The darkness had told her that she was chosen for a job, a very important job she needed to do. And this girl, this strange girl, was one of her targets.

Someone she was meant to kill.

\---

“Simmons doesn’t remember who she is.”

Coulson looked up as Daisy stormed into his office, not even bothering to knock before she slammed the door open. “By all means, please, come in.”

Daisy crossed her arms over her chest, staring Coulson down. “Did you hear me?”

The director leaned back in his chair, sighing. “Skye.”

“Daisy.” The correction came instinctively, even though right now she didn’t care what people called her. She only cared about Jemma (Jemma, _Jemma_ ).

Coulson gave a patient smile. “Daisy. Simmons has been through an immense trauma. She would be the first to tell you that amnesia is an all-too-common response to trauma and is more than likely only temporary.”

“This isn’t amnesia. She attacked me. It was like she was an…Inhuman.”

A brow was raised at her. “Daisy, I-“ Alarms began to blare and lights spun wildly as the security system was triggered, cutting Coulson off midsentence.

“We have a problem.” May was suddenly standing in the door, eyes flicking between Daisy and the director, who keyed in a command to quiet the alarms.

Frustrated, Daisy released a groan. “We have a lot of problems. Jemma-“

“Is gone.”

Silence filled the room in the wake of May’s revelation. The air felt as if it had been sucked out of Daisy’s lungs, her mind struggling to process the words. “Jemma…gone?” _Not again, not again, oh God no, not again._

Coulson was on the move, following May down the hall. Daisy wasn’t far behind, her body quickly trailing after them while her brain struggled to catch up.

May and Coulson were just ahead of her, lights spinning silently as May quickly debriefed the director. In her panic, Daisy only caught a few words. “Broke in…gone…left…HYDRA.” The last one caught her attention and she snapped her eyes to May, her heart skipping a beat at the name.

“HYDRA? Here?”

If May was annoyed at having to repeat herself, she didn’t show it, just turning to bring Daisy into the conversation as they passed the lab, racing towards the outer doors. “They broke in. They have Simmons.”

“They took her?”

May took a beat to answer and in that moment of silence, she knew something was very, very wrong. “No. She- she went with them.”

\---

The other woman (the one who had called her _Jemma_ ) had left her cage but it wasn’t long before she had another visitor. She had been looking at her hands, wondering where that strength had come from. It was strange – the strength was unfamiliar but it felt _right_. She was meant for this, meant for something bigger than herself. She and the other woman were two strings, closely woven together. Their fates were closely intertwined. (There would be more strings, enough to fill a tapestry of life and death.)

Looking up from her hands, her eyes fell on a man. The door to her cell was open, and he stood in the doorway, watching her with interest.

“You’re the one they chose?” he asked, his voice tinged with curiosity. His eyes trailed over her. “I thought they would have wanted the big one. Ah well, beggars can’t be choosers now can they? You are our new Soldier.” He quirked his head at her. “Let’s go.”

The man left and she stood. A force within her nudged her to follow and she complied, knowing that whatever she was meant to do, she would be able to do it with the help of this man. She stood to follow him, pulling the string of her dressing gown tighter around herself. Something still connected her to the woman she had attacked earlier, a thread that wound through the halls and around corners. Somehow, she knew where the other girl was and knew that she had to kill her, but her instincts urged her against it. _Not now_ , they whispered. _Not yet._

She didn’t see the older woman in the lab, the one who took angry one look between Jemma and the man before disappearing.

The man led her out into a hall, where lights began to flash and alarms to wail. A few seconds after they had begun, the alarms quieted, but the orange security flights continued to whirl.

A set of large, steel double doors loomed at the end of the hall.

Jemma and the man made their way towards the doors, and she noticed for the first time the soldiers guarding them. They were dressed in all black with red patches on their shoulders. The vault door had been forced open and these men were meant to keep the exit clear.

The man walked her briskly towards the exit, towards freedom, but a cry from the opposite end of the hall halted their progress.

“Jemma!”

It was the strange woman, anguish laced in her voice. The man turned to confront her and the Winter Soldier followed his lead, feeling the hum in her fingertips reach itself up her arms and wrap itself around her heart, guarding her. Recognition flashed through her for a moment and then the hum filled her, emptying her mind of anyone she was and everyone she knew before.

Two more people flanked the woman but the Soldier ignored them. They were not her primary target.

\---

Daisy stared in utter disbelief at the scene before her. Jemma, willingly leaving the base with none other than Grant Ward.

Jemma’s name was ripped from her throat before she could stop it. Grant and Jemma turned to look at her. For a moment, Daisy swore that Jemma knew who she was, that Jemma was _Jemma_ again, but then that recognition disappeared and the Jemma from quarantine was back, the one who didn’t know who she was, who anyone was.

May and Coulson appeared next to her and Daisy could see the grin on Ward’s face widen as he took a step forward.

“Well, well, well, isn’t this lovely,” Ward’s voice was like velvet, with no indication that he did not think this moment was anything but lovely, that he was enjoying himself very much indeed. “All we need is Fitz for this reunion to be complete.”

At the mention of Fitz’s name, Daisy willed Jemma to react, to show any sign of familiarity towards her partner’s name. But this new Jemma was stoic as always and Daisy knew that the Jemma who went into the Monolith was not the Jemma who returned.

“Let her go, Ward.” Coulson’s voice was low, authoritative, the gun in his hand pointed directly at Ward, May his mirror on Daisy’s other side.

Ward glanced at Jemma, at her lack of restraints. “She’s free to do as she wishes. I am not taking her, she’s joining us.” He looked at the other men. “Take care of this please,” he ordered, placing a hand at the small of Jemma’s back and turning her with him to leave the base.

The HYDRA Agents raised their weapons and Daisy acted on instinct, letting the power that resided in her core echo out through her fingertips, a pressure blast meant to take out Ward. At the moment, she couldn’t care less about the HYDRA Agents and their guns; her sole focus was eliminating Ward and getting Jemma back.

Before the blast can reach them, Jemma whipped around, pushing Ward out of the way at an inhuman speed, and raising her own hands to take the blast. Daisy watched in disbelief as the pressure wave was absorbed into Jemma’s hands. She spun, flinging out an arm and releasing the energy back at the three SHIELD Agents. Daisy felt her own attack slam into them, felt herself flying backwards at the intensity of pressure. She blacked out momentarily as she slammed into the wall. Her vision cleared just in time to glimpse her friend disappearing as the vault doors slid shut.

And just like that, Jemma was gone. Again.

\---

In the moment before the pulse reached her, Jemma felt foreign instincts overtake her, felt her body acting on its own accord. The hum that had twisted itself in her chest was suddenly in her arms and her legs and she was pushing her rescuer out of harms way and her hands were reaching out to meet the attack. A pulse rushed towards her but she felt the hum reach out further than her hands, an energy sourced from herself, reaching out to greet the pulse like an old friend. It pulled it into her and she felt a power fill her, an energy like nothing she had ever felt before. And then her hand was flying out, the energy releasing from her fingertips. Her opponents fell and the alien hum reconciled itself back into her chest, waiting to be called on again.

As she left with the man ( _Ward, his name was Ward_ ), she glanced back one last time. Her heart ached at the sight of the strange woman on the ground, stirring slightly. A painful twinge of familiarity alighted within her before the hum doused it, and she wasn’t sure if it would ever burn again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't think i can ever apologize enough for how long it took me to write this but that doesn't mean i can't try; i'm really sorry for how long it took me to update this fic. hopefully i can write the next chapter before next year.
> 
> please review; it's my birthday and some reviews would make a lovely present.

**Author's Note:**

> so this a skimmons winter soldier type au starring jemma as bucky barnes and daisy as steve rogers. this is also my first time posting on ao3 so please review! this is also all that i have written so far and if you would like to read more, please please let me know! thank you so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed!


End file.
